Search results for: "Form"

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  2. The Demands of Goodwill
     … The author said they formed the social dimension of Buddhism, whereas everything else was totally devoted to the training of your mind—as if you could separate the two. One of the reasons we practice is that we look at our lives, we look at our desire for happiness; but then we also turn around and look at how much harm our desire for … 
  3. Expert’s Mind
     … In his meditation instructions he doesn’t set everything out in a nice step-by-step form that even brainless people could follow. Instead, he plants suggestions in our minds, points out areas where it’s fruitful to explore, and then leaves it up to our own ingenuity to continue the exploration. He wants to make us curious, so that we follow our curiosity … 
  4. The Alternative of Concentration
     … From its perspective, you can see which pleasures are innocuous and which ones aren’t; which forms of being harsh with yourself are innocuous or actually helpful, and which ones are not. You can measure them right here. Which is what happens with any skill. As the mind gets more and more centered, more and more absorbed in performing whatever the action is, and … 
  5. The Strength of Conviction
     … how it focuses on things, how its attitude can change an experience from pleasant to painful, from painful back to pleasant—all depending on your perception, all depending on the feeling, all those elements of fabrication or the elements of name in name-and-form. What you see as important, what you see as unimportant: This can really change how you experience the body … 
  6. Shoulds & Desires
     … It’s a form of wealth that doesn’t require that you take anything. You’ve got the resources inside. Simply by the way you think, you can create a good energy. You can create something that’s a gift to others. And of course, you benefit. If you have goodwill for all beings, you’re very unlikely to do unskillful things. You’re … 
  7. The Light of the World
     … At the very least, they’re a form of happiness that’s harmless. You harm no one when you’re generous; you harm no one when you’re virtuous. Finding well-being with thoughts of universal goodwill causes no harm at all. This is very different from the happiness defined by the world in terms of gain, status, praise, physical pleasures. Happiness of that … 
  8. The Samsaric Mud Fight
     … It can be a form of generosity. But you have to realize that people have their choices, too. They can choose to follow along with your idea of what’s good or they can choose not to. The Buddha never said that we’re here to clean up the mud fight. We’re here to get out of the mud fight. And your idea … 
  9. When This Is, That Is
     … Your sense of the form of the body becomes the object of your meditation, along with the feelings that arise from the breath when it’s comfortable. Those can be a part of right concentration. The perceptions you have can be part of right view, but also right concentration and right mindfulness as well. The thought constructs you have, directing your thoughts to the … 
  10. The Power of Attention
     … In name and form, there’s attention, how you pay attention to things, the questions you ask. These two go together. As you’re focusing on the breath, that’s the first choice you’ve made. You’re going to choose the breath as your topic. You can choose other meditation topics as well. If you find that it’s best to start out … 
  11. Defilements as Not-self
     … The goodwill is a form of indoctrination. For a lot of us, having goodwill for ourselves is hard. We come from a guilt culture in which we’re taught to feel bad for ourselves, to feel that we don’t deserve happiness. This is a vein that lies deep in our culture. It’s one of the things that Ajaan Suwat had the most … 
  12. Goodwill as Wealth
     … That sense of well-being in the body is an important form of wealth. When you think about being generous with material things, it’s a lot easier to be generous when you have wealth, when you have a sense that you have more than enough. And it’s the same when we’re spreading thoughts of goodwill, thoughts of compassion to other people … 
  13. Learn from Your Mistakes
     … This is why we have the practice of goodwill for all, compassion for all, remembering that we ourselves have been lower forms of life in the past. What kind of treatment would we have wanted then? Kind treatment, fair treatment. And again, we’re the ones who are harmed by our misbehavior. We have to keep that point in mind. The fourth way is … 
  14. Inconstancy
     … In other words, the simple process of forming a concept in the mind based on something takes so much time, even though it’s a flash of the eye. But in that flash of the eye, whatever it was that you based that concept on has already changed. Change is that pervasive and relentless. So even the mountains are impermanent, but they’re permanent … 
  15. Focus on the Precepts
     … of which is to comprehend suffering. Suffering itself is an action. It’s the act of clinging to the aggregates. The aggregates are actions, too. The Buddha defines them as verbs. Form deforms, feelings feel, perceptions perceive, and so on. Then you apply the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and non-self to those actions and their results, because the duty with regard to those … 
  16. The Path Has a Goal
     … You want there to be people who are suffering so that you can enjoy being compassionate to them? Your sense of wellbeing needs to feed off other people’s pain? What kind of ideal is that? The best possible ideal is to follow a path leading to a happiness that doesn’t depend on other people’s suffering in any way, shape, or form … 
  17. Lessons from the Breath
     … But if you do it with knowledge, it goes in the other direction and helps form a basis for your other intentions as well. When you’re going to act—when you’re going to say things, do things, or think things—it’s based on your perceptions and your feelings, the things you focus on as being important. This is all in the … 
  18. Mindfulness of Death & the Deathless
     … The specifics can make many, many more forms. But he says you cling to your craving in the same way that a fire in one house, as it moves to another house, clings to the wind. We would say that the wind blows it, but their explanation was that the fire needed some sort of support, some sort of sustenance, and the wind is … 
  19. Weathering Karma Storms
     … So, we all have our problems getting the mind to settle down, and those problems will come in different forms. If you’re experiencing a mind storm right now, you can say, “Okay, this is my past bad karma, but I want to make sure I don’t make any bad karma now by the way I breathe, by the way I talk to … 
  20. All of a Piece
     … a self with form, a formless self, a finite self, an infinite self, a little self inside the body like little homunculus, or your body inside a much larger self. However you define self, he says, that comes under the issue of the not-self teaching. Ideally, just don’t even think in those terms. But like karma, it’s not as if, when … 
  21. Skillful Desire
    It’s often assumed that the Buddha criticized desire of every form. After all, he said the three kinds of craving were the cause of suffering. But those three kinds of craving don’t cover every kind of desire. In fact, he says all phenomena, all experience, come from desire. That includes skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. The only thing that doesn … 
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